(Though impeachment is too slow a process to make that deadline. The options to get Trump out in time to lock Pence’s choice for new VP would be either getting Trump to resign, which is incredibly unlikely, or invoking the 25th Amendment, which can be very rapid but requires 2/3 of both branches of Congress and a majority of the cabinet and the VP. Which requires an incredibly large number of people who want to dump the president. But hey, it’s Trump we’re talking about, so anything is possible!)
I mean in the unlikely scenario that an ascended President Pence needs to pick a VP, it’s a hugely risky play for a Democratic-controlled House to not approve. That burns a ton of political capital and cedes an awful lot of high ground in what might be just 12 months before the 2020 general.
There is practically no upside to leaving the VP office vacant. It would mean that Pence would never resign or be removed from office, and therefore the VP would make a difference only if Pence died in office.
So yeah, that’s a lot of political capital to squander betting on Pence’s untimely death.
There is no “Republican party”, only Trump. The crazy train has left the station and it’s too late to get off. The base worships DJT and won’t accept any other substitutes.
Clearly they should trust a Trump appointee to do the right thing for the country, because that’s worked so well in the past!
Or maybe they should say, “Gee, pretty much everyone in the Trump administration has turned out to be a fucking criminal. So rather than take the chance of aiding and abetting an ongoing criminal operation by approving yet another criminal, we’re going to take our time investigating your nominee … oh, and you too, President Pence. We’ll get back to you in a year or three. Just doing our job of oversight! Of course, you could speed things along by nominating someone truly squeaky clean and actually bipartisan. Merrick Garland, perhaps.”
This is what the Dems in Congress thought when they voted in Ford. “We’ll look like jerks, passing on such a bland guy. And what’s Mr. Bland gonna do, turn around and pardon Nixon in the face of overwhelming public opposition?”
For a little while. Then somehow the meme got started that Dems were wimps. Wonder how that happened?
Meanwhile, Nixon went free and Ford successfully normalized giving pardons for the GOP’s crimes so well that old H W was able to give them out like candy for Iran-Contra and face only minimal blowback.
Edit: the bigger point I’m making is that allowing crooks to have their picks is a fundamentally flawed process since crooks will pick crooks (or, in the case of Ford, willing patsies.)
The “For a little while” required two greatly unique confluences in American political history: a sitting president with working majorities in both houses of congress who couldn’t seem to pass policy to save his own skin and weirdly steered his party towards austerity, and then a charismatic politician able to exploit each of those weaknesses one by one. And then add into that what now appears to be an outlier in economic situation (regarding inflation and unemployment at the same time) and an international crisis the US wasn’t prepared for (Iran), and these things happen.
If I’m a Democratic strategist, I’m betting rolling snake-eyes 6 or 7 times in a row isn’t going to happen again.
I’d say the recent historical record show Democratic strategists are perfectly capable of rolling snake-eyes multiple times in a row. One might even say that Democratic strategists are the problem.
Suppose they had refused to confirm Ford. At the time, the House was controlled by Democrats and therefore Nixon would have been succeeded by a Democrat.
Do you really think Nixon would have been pressured to resign by Republicans if it meant a change in power? I doubt it, in fact I think Democratic refusal to confirm Ford would embolden and incense enough Republican Senators that Nixon would easily survive impeachment and serve out his term.
In fact, Woodward and Bernstein’s “The Final Days” makes this point pretty explicitly. Had Carl Albert not gotten Gerald Ford confirmed, Nixon’s allies in the House and Senate were unlikely to have ditched him.
Well, that’s something, I guess. It only took an historically unpopular president and a hilariously inept Republican tax bill to begin turning around the long string of congressional and state-level failures.
I think you need some perspective. Republicans had unified control of Congress for only four years before losing it, which is also how long Democrats held onto both houses the last time they took control. Four years might seem like a long string to you, but it’s merely an instant in politics.
